Thank you! It is a great, as usual, to be back here. I consider
Carol LaGrasse an absolutely national treasure for what she has
managed to accomplish. I am especially honored to come back because
this is I believe in the nine conferences that she has had, this
is the fifth time Ive been here, which is three more than
my buddy, Jim Burling.

The first one I was at in 1995 the keynote speaker then was an
obscure Congressman from California by the name of Richard Pombo,
and Richard Pombo is the author of this new approach to the Endangered
Species Act (ESA) that may finally protect private property rights
that Jim was telling you about. You people who care about property
and have had problems with the ESA need to send a note to and
say thanks to Richard Pombo. Congressmen like to hear that when
they do that kind of work.

Now, my talk today has some bazaar title, Pleistocene
ParkA Threat to Civilization. What does that mean?
Well, on Thursday, August 18, this summer while most of you may
have been enjoying the end of your summer vacation, the kids were
at summer camp or whatever, you might be planning to go off on
Friday and take your last three-day vacation to go to the beach
or go trout fishing or something like that, the worlds most
distinguished and prestigious science journal, called Nature,
hit the news stands. It contained a remarkable article written
by twelve authors, ecologists and conservationists, all at ten
different American universities and institutions, and it called
for the creation of something called the U.S. Ecological History
Park.

Okay, so what? Just another park. We have got hundreds of national
parks. What is one more? Just a little more private land acquired
by the government, a little more loss of liberty as the government
land ownership continues to expand and is now almost fifty percent
of all the land in the United States. But this was a park with
a twist. It wasnt just another 100,000 acres here or 500,000
acres there. It calls for taking much, if not most, of the land
in the Great Plains, the short grass and the mid grass prairies,
all the land from the east side of the Rocky Mountains to the
western edge of the tall grass prairies just to the west of the
Mississippi River, and turning it into a park. This includes much
of the land of ten states from Canada to MexicoMontana,
Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska,
Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. If my math is right, these ten states
are about one fifth or twenty percent of the entire United States.
And this includes several hundred thousand square miles of land.

Well, for what? What they want to do is restore the ecosystem
and all the large animals that roamed North America 10,000 to
13,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age, which
were killed off by the Native Americans, which they werent
supposed to do apparently according to modern Greens. Now, unfortunately,
the mastodons are gone, the mammoths are gone, the saber tooth
tigers are gone, camels are long gone. So what to do? Well, not
to worry. What these scientists are planning to do is take their
nearest kin and begin re-introducing them to the Great Plains
and this will restore, or here is an important word, re-wild
the ecosystem and the wildlife that belonged there before humans
came here and starting messing up nature. It will help save large
animals that are endangered elsewhere in the world. So the plan
calls for re-introducing, and as soon as possible, get this, African
elephants, Asian elephants, Asian lions, African cheetahs, Bactrian
camels (that is, the Mongolian camel with the two humps (not the
Arabian camel with one hump), all sorts of wild horses, and also
those wild giant Bolson tortoise. There are still a few of them
left in northern Mexico. This will involve removing all fences
on the plains and other barriers to free migration of all these
animals. They hope to begin it almost immediately on some of the
vast private ranch lands owned by exceedingly wealthy Green landowners
like Ted Turner, who owns more land than anybody else in America.
And Drummond Hadleymany of you may know him. He owns the
entire boot heel of New Mexico. He is a very eccentric multi-zillionaire
heir to the Anheuser Busch fortune. What they want to do, because
these are private ranches, is to begin stocking the ranches almost
immediately with elephants and cheetahs and the tortoises. Then
they think they can complete their whole project within the next
fifty years by working in cooperation with BLM (Bureau of Land
Management), the U.S. Forest Service, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service.

Most of you are probably saying to yourselves that this is a total
joke and silly nonsense. But, unfortunately, I suggest, this is
deadly serious and this kind of idea and the ideas leading up
to it are becoming more popular all the time.

This idea has come from a joint vision of a number of groups.
The radical Greens and so-called monkey wrenchers, if you know
who they are. Also effete urban planners at some of the eastern
universities, the deep ecologists who sit around and figure out
whats the relationship of man to the rest of the world,
and the saving-the-creation religionists. While the article surely
jolted the worlds media for about a week this summer, there
was no cry of outrage from the scientific community at all. And
it quickly became nicknamed the Pleistocene Park. Leading conservationists
and ecologists called it a bold vision. Its
certainly that. It will fill long vacant ecological niches.
It will return U.S. grasslands to their evolutionary health.
And, we are trying to look at a bigger conservation pattern.
And they also say, well, it will bring in eco-tourism.

Well, it may bring some eco-tourists, perhaps, but it will
also make it rather dangerous to step outside your door early
in the morning and let your kids go outside if a lion decides
to eat your kids. We already had a couple of problems with that
with grizzly bears and the Endangered Species Act in Montana.

One of the victims of the ESA was a guy named John Schuller
who, late at night, saw grizzly bears, three of them. He had floodlights
all around his house. There were so many grizzly bears out there,
but they were endangered and he couldnt do anything about
them. They were headed right to the corral where he had just gathered
all of his sheep in for the winter. So, wearing nothing but his
underwearhe had just taken a shower and he was coming downstairs
to watch TV, he grabbed a rifle by the door and went running out
into the dark and the snow and the hail and everything looking
for them. The sheep were milling all over. Suddenly, he heard
a noise and the grizzly bear came rising up and charging at him.
He shot the grizzly bear, and he was cited for violating the Endangered
Species Act.

Although there is a clause that says self-defense is excusable,
justifiable, the judges said no, no, no,this wasnt
self-defense. He was putting himself deliberately in harms
way by protecting his property. He should have stayed in his home
where he belonged. You can imagine what is going to happen now
when youve got elephants and African lions and everything
running all over the place.

Well, there were very few critics of the program. One was a scientist,
M. A. Sanjayan at the Nature Conservancy, of all places, who said,
I see some problems with this. Well, duh!

Lets look at the plans origins, two parallel movements,
and friends.

One, the radical Greens and deep ecologists say man has been
destroying the planet, the ecosystems, biodiversity, and especially
the large carnivores. And talking about large carnivores and talking
about California, as we have been, there is a reason that the
only place you find grizzly bears in California is on their state
flag. People have a tendency to not like to have things around
that suddenly eat you.

Then, almost all of these radical environmental groups support
zero population growth and actually even negative population growth.
Most of them believe that humans are exceeding the carrying capacity
of the planet. First we must stabilize and then reduce human population
growth. It is six billion now. Probably, you would find the leaders
of most of the environmental groups agreeing that the human population
of the planet should be reduced to about two billion or even one
billion, and some of the hard-core think that we shouldnt
have more than about a few hundred million humans on the planet
if the planet is going to operate as it should ecologically or
whatever. Many very prominent ones are talking about the necessity
of having the government eventually come up with licenses to breed,
and have written about it in journals that normal people never
look at. They talk about two or one child maximum families in
the United States.

Two, books. Some people are starting to catch on to what really
is behind and driving environmentalism. People join the Audubon
Society because they want to save birds or watch birds. What the
Audubon Society leaders are really about is something very different.
I highly recommend you look at two important books by major writersMichael
Creightons recent book, State of Fear. He understands
what the Greens are trying to do and the devastation they are
trying to cause. Also Tom Clancys book, Rainbow Six.
In 1979 another person, Lynn White, a philosopher at the University
of California, wrote an important article saying that the Judeo-Christian
religion was destroying the planet because it convinced people
that God actually told man to go forth and be fruitful and multiply
and he gave man dominion over the creation, and this was a mistake.
Then there is something called Greening the Churches Movement,
and they had a big huge conference called Caring for the Creation
in 1990 in the National Cathedral in Washington. Everybody was
there, the top Catholic leaders, the Archbishop of Canterbury,
Muslims, Hare Krishna, American Indians, and you name it. And
Prince Philip of England was there, too. Prince Philip is famous
for his statement that, if there is reincarnation, he hopes to
come back as the deadly virus so it can exterminate the human
race and save the planet. He has actually seriously said that.
They all talk about the hubris of mankind, for man to think that
he was more important than the rest of Gods creation and
actually an endangered butterfly is just as important in Gods
eye as men and women. We werent created in the image of
the Creator. This whole movement actually it is a very interesting,
because they begin to worship the creation rather than the Creator.

Then the father of this whole concept, this modern concept
that has led to the Pleistocene Park idea, is Dave Foreman. You
may know that Dave Foreman used to be a respectable lobbyist for
the Wilderness Society. He got tired of that, saw that it wasnt
working, wasnt saving the planet, so in 1979 he started
Earth First with an exclamation point on the end of it, We
mean this! They started a concept called monkey wrenching,
and that is, they are modern day Luddites. You had Ned Lud, who
wanted to stop the industrial revolution and said, you throw a
spanner in the works and all the machines will all shut down.
Edward Abbey, a writer, wrote a book called the Monkey Wrench
Gang and, also, Hayduke Lives. Paul Watson is his buddy
who runs the Sea Shepherd that goes around and rams and sinks
ships that are trying to catch whales. They all believe man is
a cancer on the planet, man is a plague on the planet. It was
Dave Foreman that came up with the idea of tree spiking, hammering
spikes in the trees to shut down the timber industry, because
when you run them through a sawmill, the blades explode when they
hit a spike. One guy almost had his neck ripped off, almost died.
A number of people were harmed, so then they put in x-ray machines
to find the metal spikes. So then the Earth First! people started
putting in porcelain spikes that you couldnt find. This
is called eco-sabotage. They said, if you are dying of cancer,
you know you are a goner, why just go quietly? Tie a big bomb
to yourself and go tie yourself to Grand Cooley Dam or Boulder
Dam and blow up the dam and take it with you. Save the planet
when you die.

This set the foundation for modern eco-terrorism, the Animal
Liberation Front, Environmental Liberation Front, and so on. In
1989 Dave Foreman was caught with three other Earth Firsters trying
to blow up the transmission towers to the power lines that went
in and out of the Arizona nuclear power plant. He wasnt
prosecuted, but there was a quiet deal made that he had to leave
Earth First! because he was too charismatic. Well, that was a
mistake, because he has caused more trouble since. In 1990 he
and his friend, Reed Noss started The Wildlands Project, which
believes it is a mistake to let humans run the planet and place
nature and wildlife in parks and preserves and refuges like zoos.
It is man who is the dangerous one and man must be restricted
to preserves, while the rest of the continent is re-wilded. They
said, we are doing it backwards. We need to restore and return
a minimum of fifty percent of all the land in North America to
wilderness and let ecosystems work naturally, evolve naturally.
Start with existing corridors like National Parks, wilderness
areas, most of the Rockies and the Sierras, remove all traces
of man in therebuildings, roads, railroads, everythingand
then connect them all with corridors, with greenways, with trails,
so wildlife can move, and surround them all with buffer zones.
Humans should be banned from the core areas. Then he even called
for prohibition of air flights over these corridors, because a
lot of the Greens get outraged when they are out in the wilderness
area and they look up and see a con trail. They say a con trail
bothers them. A cloud is okay but a con trail really upsets them.
Their magazine is Wild Earth. Get a copy of Wild Earth
and see what these people are talking about.

Again, when it was started in 1990, it was considered a kooky
idea. It is now pretty well mainstream. Their vision statement
is:

Our vision is simple. We live for the day when grizzlies
in Mexico have an unbroken connection to grizzlies in Alaska,
when gray wolf populations are continuous from New Mexico to
Greenland, when vast unbroken forests and flowing plains again
thrive and support pre-Columbian populations of plants and animals,
when humans dwell with respect, harmony, and affection for the
land, when we come to live no longer as strangers and aliens
to this continent.

They have since added connecting the panthers of Florida with
the mountain lions of northern Canada. This is another crackpot
scheme that is now mainstream. Conservation biologists around
the world, thousands upon thousands of biologists, scientists,
and conservationists all accept this. Science Magazine
did a formidable thing on it. One of Dave Foremans big arguments
is that civilization is destroying man as man because when man
used to live out in places where he was being tracked and followed
by jaguars and grizzlies and tigers, only then was he truly alive
and truly man because he could feel suddenly the hair on the nape
of his neck rise. He had six senses that weve lost now and
you knew that meant a tiger was about to attack you and that was
the only time that you were alive. Well, maybe so, but a second
later that was when you were suddenly dead. The last thing you
would hear if you could hear anything was the crunch of the tigers
jaws through your skull.

Now, a lot of people claim that The Wildlands Program is some
international conspiracy of the United Nations. It is not. It
is just normal biologists and environmentalists. It is a vision
they have. They think man was a mistake on the planet and we have
to create balance.

Then the next thing that appeared on the scene was a guy by
the name of Dr. Frank Popper and his grad student, now his wife,
Dr. Deborah Popper, who, in 1987, were both urban intellectuals,
both professors of urban planning at Rutgers University. They
published an eight-page article in Planning magazine called
The Great Plains from Dust to Dust: A Daring Proposal for
Dealing with an Incipient Disaster. They said that several
hundred thousand square miles of the plains have less than six
people per square mile. Thats the density that was very
important in United States history when historian Frederick Jackson
Turner used it in his frontier thesis to declare that once every
county had at last six people per square mile the American frontier
was closed. That was back in 1893. Many counties out there today
have fewer than two persons per square mile and some of that area
is losing population. Frontier counties are increasing. There
are supposedly over 6,000 ghost towns in western Kansas and only
6.5 million people living in this whole area, which is less than
the population of the state of Georgia. And they want to take,
they propose taking a minimum of 20 million acres to start to
de-privatize all that land. That is their scheme. Tear down the
fences, re-introduce vast buffalo herds. They were going to create
the Buffalo Commons, and let the buffalo roam across all the way
from Texas and Mexico up into Canada through all the Great Plains
like they used to before people were there. They thought they
might start with the semi-voluntary program and have the U.S.
Forest Service pay farmers and ranchers for fifteen years to replant
and restore native grasses. At the end of those fifteen years
the Forest Service would purchase all of their land except that,
if they wanted to, they would be allowed to have a forty-acre
homestead and thats it. They want to restore the commons.
They say it is manifest destiny in reverse.

It was first met with outrage. They had to have state troopers
protecting them when they went to give little talks out in the
Great Plains and so on, but now some government agencies out there
are saying, hey, this is cool. This will allow us to get some
mission creep going and get federal funding and so on, work with
the Forest Service and BLM and the National Fish and Wildlife
Service. Just a couple of years ago the North Dakota State Labor
Market Information Center endorsed the whole concept. And some
state travel bureaus are endorsing it and chambers of commerce
and saying, hey, well get eco-tourists out here to see the
buffalo. Well, you can go see the buffalo in half a dozen federal
parks already. Now, this is what? This is almost exactly the very
same several hundred thousand square miles from Canada to Mexico
that was proposed for the Pleistocene Park.

Then in 2001 an Australian paleontologist and mammalogist by the
name of Tim Flannery, who I know fairly well, wrote a book called
The Eternal Frontier  An Ecological History of North
America. I visited with him in Australia. He is the worlds
leading expert on extinction of the gigantic Pleistocene marsupials
in Australia. He is proposing that we might stop extinction of
big mammals around the world if we took all the relatives of the
extinct North America fauna and returned them. To show where he
is coming from, in his book The Future Eaters he suggested
the human population of Australia was already way too big, that
it had to be reduced from twenty million people to a mere six
million people and that brings us back to the August 18 issue
of Nature magazine and the first serious proposal by leading
scientists to call for the de-population of the heartland of America
and filling it with a vast alien and native mega-fauna.

Dont say you werent warned or, who was that masked
man? some day in the future.

What I wanted to try to do, as quickly as I could, was to just
give you an overview of where all these different streams of thought
are coming from. Each time you hear about a new plan or new land
grabs, whether it is a Highlands project or whether it is the
Y2Y project (this huge corridor from the Yukon to Yellowstone),
the Tall Grass Prairie, the Northern Forest Lands, new National
Trails, re-introducing new endangered species, this is all coming
under essentially the guideline of this philosophy that the leading
Greens and Green philosophers and deep ecologists and urban planners
and so on have, what the leaders of the environmental movement
begin with. This was just sort of a thing that most people saw
this summer and really couldnt believe, couldnt take
it seriously, but this is really what is behind the philosophy
of environmentalism. Thank you.

Back to:

&COPY; 2005 Property Rights Foundation of America,
Inc.
All rights reserved. This material may not be broadcast, published,
rewritten or redistributed without written permission.